Tag: Horror

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 30: Some Shorts and One-Shots

Have you ever had a memory that you weren’t exactly sure was real? Recently, when I was coming up with the list of episodes and series to cover throughout October, I faintly recalled an OVA I’d seen some years ago. All I could remember about it was that it involved people fighting using calligraphy, and that the title probably started with an “S.” Not very helpful. I first checked over what I had saved on my large hard drive of archived anime, and no dice. Then I tried to Google search based on various keywords. Nope. It wasn’t until I took my entire lunch break today to go through My Anime List year-by-year that I finally figured out what it was. Hopefully the result will be worthwhile to my readers!

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 28: Shiki

There’s almost nothing as satisfying to me as revisiting something I enjoyed in the past and realizing just how correct I was about it. Case in point: Shiki. I watched the series as a simulcast in one of the earlier incarnations of Funimation’s video streaming service. I had a backlog of episodes and spent an afternoon catching up to the current simulcast episode so I could watch it week-to-week from there (I believe episode 11 or 12; it was somewhere about halfway through the series). I’d been lukewarm about the series at first until that point; then I was hooked. But there are a lot of series I watched around that time period that I probably wouldn’t enjoy nearly as much more than a decade later. But I had the opportunity to watch Shiki again within the past couple of years and I think I may like it even better now.

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 27: Kakurenbo: Hide and Seek

Mou ii kai?

Mou ii yo.

Thus begins a game of kakurenbo.

When you’re part of a group for a long time, you get to see the culture of that group develop and traditions emerge. The anime club I attend has always had a Halloween event where, rather than watching the typically scheduled anime (the series that people have voted on for that particular semester), there’s a costume contest and selections of spooky one-off anime to watch instead (some of the selections I’ve featured so far on this list have turned up in the past). Oftentimes folks will watch something as a younger attendee of the club that they’ll want to return to again a few years later; since many of the special event episodes that we watch are more obscure/lesser-known that your typical mainstream anime, I’m sure it leaves a stronger impression on many people. The first time I saw Kakurenbo was at one of these events many years ago.

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 26: Blood-C

Hey look, it’s time for vampires again. Or is it? Over the years there have been a few different entries in the Blood franchise, which began in 2000 with Blood: The Last Vampire. In that animated film, a teenage girl named Saya battles vampire-like creatures on behalf of some mysterious American handlers, while allegedly (as we discover later) being an immortal vampire herself. In 2005’s Blood+, an alternative universe retelling of the general details of the film plays out over 50-something episodes. But we’re not here to talk about either of those versions today. Instead I’d rather share my feelings on the “black sheep” of the family, 2011’s Blood-C.

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 22: Ayakashi Samurai Horror Tales – Bakeneko

Because I’m standing on the cusp of returning to work after an extended leave-of-absence, I thought I’d take today to write about one of my favorite pieces of media in order to soften the blow a bit. Many years ago, I happened upon a series called Ayakashi – Samurai Horror Tales (or Ayakashi Japanese Classic Horror depending on who’s translating the title). The anthology series adapts three horror tales from Japanese literature and theater. Or, more accurately, adapts a story and a play, and then spends three episodes on an original tale drawn from Japanese myth. It’s that original story, called “Bakeneko,” (“Demon Cat”) I’m writing about today.

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 17: Aoi Bungaku Episodes 11-12

When one hears the phrase “blue literature,” one might first believe that the phrase describes literature with a lot of inappropriate humor. However, the adjective blue or “aoi” in this context refers symbolically to youthfulness. Aoi Bungaku or Blue Literature then refers to stories considered evergreen classics within the Japanese canon, and this is what the series contains.

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 16: School-Live!

As a long time anime fan, something I rarely experience is feeling “fooled” by something that I watch. There are certainly many anime with plot twists and turns, some of which spring up out of nowhere, but often enough the writing is on the wall if you know where to look (and if a twist is a complete and utter surprise with no clues whatsoever… well, that’s just poor writing). I do, however, enjoy being surprised by the media I consume, and then I further enjoy realizing that I could have figured out the surprise all along if I had just been paying better attention to the clues being dropped in front of my face.

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 15: The Lost Village

In most cases, I’m perfectly happy to chalk up a difference in opinion as such and not get too hot-headed about it. As an anime fan, I’ve seen plenty of flame wars blow up over inconsequential nonsense over the years and I like to think I’ve learned my lesson. But there are still some times where I find myself grumbling over “people being wrong on the internet,” and the commentary surrounding the 2016 TV anime series The Lost Village was one of those situations.

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 13: Mars Red

I felt like it was about time for some more vampires, so I wanted to revisit an interesting series from a couple of years ago that I really enjoyed. Mars Red is an animated interpretation of a live-action stage read (I’m not sure what makes this distinct from a typical play, but it’s how the source material is specifically described) and takes place in Japan in the early 20th century.

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Halloween Seasonal Special Features

It’s Spooky Season! – Day 8: Hakaba Kitaro

We’ve gotten more than a week into this Halloween list without talking much about Yokai, so I figure it’s about time to remedy that. Yokai are a category of spiritual entity within Japanese folklore. It’s a broad term that encompasses both malevolent and benign spiritual beings, with forms that run the gamut from inanimate objects to animals to humanoids. While the concept of Yokai has existed in Japanese culture for centuries, it was the late manga artist Shigeru Mizuki, who as a child was taught about them by an older female relative, who re-popularized them within a pop-culture context.

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